<Jacqueline’s  POV>

[Missions cleared: 0

Points: 0

Missions to choose from:

Defend Base (Horned wolves) - 50 points per hour (0/2)

Tame (Saber-toothed Cheetah) - 50 points (can keep beast)]

There was no doubt about it. I had to go for the quest of defending the base. I just had to defend the base for two hours. And a base would have a higher vantage point (right?!). The mechanical voice sounded out in my head again.

[“Challenge Room Game One: Defend base against horned wolves. Rules: Use given bow, quiver set (250 arrows) and armor set. Each round has five horned wolves. Kill/defend against all horned wolves to advance to the next round within half an hour. Kill 10 horned wolves and survive two rounds of attacks to end the quest. Player gets healed after each round. From the third round, the number of horned wolves increment per ten minutes. Kill more horned wolves to get greater rewards. Repeat? Yes/No.”]

I thought ‘No’ and wore my armor set and equipped my bow and arrows. As soon as I equipped myself the scenery around me changed. I was now standing on a raised tower. It was as tall as a two story building. The weird part was that the lower one foot around the whole tower had walls of meat. The tower itself was around three meters in diameter. ‘So I just have to make sure that the horned wolves don’t eat the meat around the base of the tower. And to add on, I had to kill them within 30 minutes.’ I thought as I knocked my first arrow.

The countdown had reached zero when the five horned wolves spawned a few dozen meters in front of me. I used my ranged AoE attack and as luck would have it, the 25% chance of extra 25% damage got triggered, so all five wolves were gravely injured. “Wow, that was easy!” I exclaimed out loud. I quickly used my ‘fast attack’ to hit their vital points and before they could even reach the base of the tower, they were dead meat. Literally. Wow that definitely took less than 30 minutes.

As the countdown began again I checked how many arrows I had left. “Around two hundred left” I mumbled. By the time the countdown ended, I had already knocked one arrow on my bow, ready to attack again. I used the same strategy again, but the added damage didn’t get triggered this time for the AoE. So, the horned wolves were barely injured. “Well that was a waste of almost two dozen arrows.” I grumbled.

Quickly using fast attacks and basic attacks I piled on the damage on the horned wolves. I managed to kill two horned wolves now making it seven kills. But the other three were almost below my tower. Which meant they were within the range of my ‘precision’ attack so I quickly activated precision and then activated my skill ‘burst’ which gave me increased attack damage. Having done all this I breathed a sigh of relief as I managed to kill all the wolves and still had around a hundred and fifty arrows left in my quiver.

While I was deciding the strategy for the next round, the countdown had already begun. “Ah. Chuck it. Let me just wing it.” I realized that my CD had been refreshed so that was a good thing. That meant that I could use precision again. I decided to kill all five wolves within ten minutes. As soon as they spawned I used burst, fast attack, precision and AoE. Basically all my skills except detection. And within a span of a minute they were massacred. Now there were zero horned wolves remaining and approximately fifty arrows. “Shit. I forgot that my arrows are limited. Argh. Why don’t I ever think things through!”

<Megzie’s POV>

Now that I was facing five horned wolves I was feeling a tad bit nervous. I opened with mace AoE and used the dash skill to get behind them. Using mace CC that I had gotten to level 3, and now had a 50% chance of triggering it, I managed to give one of the horned wolves the status ailment of stun for 3 seconds. Ignoring that one, I used my bash skill on the other two. By now I had decided to make them immobile so that they’d be easier to deal with. ‘I should have thought of this earlier.’ I thought, reprimanding myself.

Using this tactic I managed to kill one horned wolf and injure two others. I used dash and created a bit of space between me and the other two completely healthy horned wolves. But suddenly, they split up and attacked both my sides simultaneously. Using a wide swing of my mace I managed to swing one away and used my evade skill on the other. Luck wasn’t on my side as I didn’t manage to dodge it. But I still managed to reduce its attack power by half. It had pounced and bitten me on my shoulder. I felt a scream escaping my mouth as I aimed my mace to my left shoulder and activated bash.

The third time I hit the horned wolf with bash, it got the status ailment of confusion and let go of me. By now the other horned wolf was ready to pounce on me. At this point I wished I had a healing skill or something, like seriously. Thankfully I was injured in my left shoulder and this didn’t affect my attack power too badly. Now if it were in my right shoulder, I’d have a bit of trouble. For now I used mace CC on the other wolf and then killed them off one by one. Honestly, I’m not sure how I’ll be able to fight against six of them. But, since I couldn’t die in the process, I might as well go all out.